Solo Leveling is a 12 episode anime based upon the Korean web novel. It’s set in a world like ours, but just that one day in the recent past, gates started opening and monsters travelled through. Coincidentally, conventional weapons like guns do not work on those monsters. At the same time, latent powers within humans started appearing, and these powers allow them to kill those monsters. Thus, the group known as Hunters were born, who are now employed to fight back the monsters that keep threatening to appear and disrupt the world.
The mechanics are such that gates will appear, and the Hunters have a time limit to enter those dungeons, find the dungeon boss and kill it. Otherwise, the gate will fully open, and monsters will pour out. It’s a gamified system that we’re used to. Hunters are ranked from S to E, and the story follows Sung, who is a lowly E ranked Hunter. He joins a run of the mill dungeon raid party to earn some money to support his family.
Given that this is anime and Sung is the protagonist, we know that the raid will not be a normal one. Well, it started off okay but then it starts to diverge, and what we get is a brutal event that’s probably every adventurer’s worst nightmare. The party is trapped facing enemies that massively outclass them. It tinges onto a bit of horror, and it isn’t afraid to show some brutal deaths. Sung shines here in that he uses his head to try to solve this encounter which is more like a puzzle rather than pure combat. Despite the slow first episode, it rapidly ramps up the pacing by the second episode.
Unfortunately, that’s where the positives kind of slowly taper off. Sung finds himself in a special situation, that ends up allowing him, and only him, to “level up”. In the real world where people’s latent abilities are pretty much set in stone and cannot ever rise in the ranks, this is a crazy development for Sung, and something that only he has. The implementation of this, however, is that it effectively gamifies the whole thing even more. He gets pop-up windows, menus, stats, ability points to distribute, daily quests, special abilities, and more.
The problem with the anime is that it pushes Sung from zero to hero within the span of an episode or two. Sung goes from the weakest to mid to the strongest way too quickly. Within a few in-story weeks he has an amazing body, and 10x his original strength, stamina and experience. He can take down bosses solo that are a few ranks above him. What this means is that like a lot of other anime protagonists, by fast forwarding his journey on gaining his power, it can feel, to the viewer, that he did not work hard to get it, and got gifted it too easily, making Sung more like a wish fulfilment character rather than one that the viewer can stand behind and empathize with.
Then, the story beats become predictable if you have watched anything like this before. It doesn’t matter that this is set in the real world anymore, it functions the same as if a character got transported into another world like in an isekai anime. The systems, the way the guilds work, and even the antagonists that Sung faces off, are all something we’ve seen before. You can easily see how Sung will face off others who are less ethical, and that he will eventually accept to use his powers to save and protect himself, getting used to fighting more powerful monsters. He will have enemies look down upon him only for the tables to turn as he reveals his true power. They’re not bad concepts, just that it’s not done in an original way.
The overpowered nature of the main character comes all the way to the forefront by the middle of the season. It’s one thing to put in a level system, it’s another to completely disregard the implicit relative power levels between Sung and his enemies. From being able to barely defeat a D-rank boss, he can then easily defeat a C-rank boss and then a week later, go and defeat a S-rank boss. The trick? Pure willpower. It’s stretching it a bit and is terrible as it shows little growth for the character at all.
There are no stakes for Sung, which deflates most of the scenes. The anime had a promising opening but then took the lazy route subsequently. A good example is towards the end of the season, Sung is fighting a boss many times higher than his level, is shown to be much stronger, much faster, and just all round severely outclassing Sung. So what happens? After spending most of the episode having the boss deliver a severe beatdown on Sung and about to lose, Sung just uses his willpower to kill the boss within one minute. It has a lack of impact. And it doesn’t help that Sung now has an uncountable number of skills, and convenient perks that just kills any sense of effort and skill.
Overall, Solo Leveling is an average power fantasy wish fulfilment self-insert anime. There is an intriguing story and mystery behind it, such as reason for the level system, which is occasionally teased, but the general plot direction is too predictable and too shallow. There is little character development, and the main character gains power so rapidly that it kills any sense of reward and satisfaction. It uses the typical plot device of willpower being able to overcome any odds, so why include a level system when you can just ignore it and still defeat your enemies?
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